ne of Silicon Valley's most innovative firms and the first technology company to go public in the nineties. The story of individuals putting in one-hundred-hour work weeks and constantly forcing down risk with entrepreneurs battling to keep the company going while running the gauntlet of investors, stock analysts, underwriters, and the SEC. The story of a young electronics firm attempting to develop a pioneering technology and to achieve capital investment necessary for future growth. Given full access to the company's records and staff, and personalities of such people as MIPS's veteran CEO, Robert Miller, it quick-thinking attorney, Bob Latta, to Connie Nga Dang, an immigrant assembly-line worker who dreams of rescuing her husband from Vietnam. A look at a company that is trying to fulfill the new American Dream in this age of high-tech companies.Lawrence Joseph Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His mother was nineteen years old and unmarried, his father was nowhere to be found. When Larry was nine months old he got pneumonia and almost died. Unable to take care of the baby, Larry was sent to live with his aunt and uncle Lillian and Louis Ellison who adopted him and gave him their name, at age twelve Larry learned that he was adopted. Larry grew up in the affluent North Side of Chicago and after graduating from high school he enrolled in the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, but left the university in his sophomore year. He later enrolled in the University of Chicago which went nowhere and in the summer of 1966 he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and go a job as a programmer. Over the next few years he did computer related work for a series of big corporations as a systems programmer. In 1973 Larry Ellison began working at Ampex, an audio and video equipment company that was working on a way to store a terabit of data using videotape. There Larry met Bob Miner and began a collaborat...
